


Little Blue Boxes

by Severa



Series: Self-Indulgent [8]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU, Gen, Infinity War nonsense, Self-Indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 08:31:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11963628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severa/pseuds/Severa
Summary: Only a carefully crafted lie could possibly save the universe from utter annihilation.





	Little Blue Boxes

Tokyo is burning.

The streets are naught but fear and sorrow. Fire lines the pavement with endless ruin; cars burn and flame, bodies smoke, and neon signs fall from tall buildings, shattering on the concrete below. Midgardians wail. Children die in their mothers’ arms. Loki pretends not to care, pretends not to feel the destruction festering in his soul, and fights on.

The Scarlet Witch is a wonder, he thinks. She’s a woman of Valkyrie’s demeanor and strength. Red magic crackles between her palms and she fights as valiantly as Sif. But whomever she might remind him of is dismissed – he dodges her attacks, even while entangled in a second battle.

Though they be Midgardian and sorcerers at the same time, they practice magic he’s long since mastered. Infantile tricks. Unskilled spells. It’s an impressive gambit, but a gambit nonetheless. A barrier of the Tesseract’s making blocks everything she throws at him.

The Vision – stronger than she, stronger than he – twists again to avoid the slice of Gungnir. The spear of a thousand lives and ten thousand deaths twirls in his hands, forever the hallmark of Asgard’s kings. Asgard, which is no more, which burned like Midgard does now, is left remembered only by its brothers. By Thor, fallen from the Bifrost like Loki had; by Loki, lost to his follies, to his past promises and current lies. There is no throne left for them to claim.

Yet he persists. The fight must go on. He must lie. His words are weapons and his words must ring true, at all costs. The Mad Titan is owed two stones and one rests upon the forehead of his opponent. The other in his pocket.

“Fall,” Loki pleads.

“I cannot,” the Vision says.

So they fight. They fight until Loki bleeds from his mouth and the Vision leaks from his eyes, black tears streaking down purple skin. Blood drips. Words are short. They fight until Loki gains the upper hand by chance, until Gungnir slices deep and true into the breast of an inorganic man.

“Fall,” Loki commands.

There is a moment between them. A whisper of magic between the stone in Loki’s pocket and the stone upon Vision’s brow. An understanding. The Vision stares blankly ahead as the scheme crests over him. He realizes the futility of his fight. Loki pretends at a speech of victory; it’s empty at its core but it makes the Scarlet Woman scream. Gungnir is pulled and speared through him again. The Vision’s face sparks and cracks around its golden shaft, cracked and broken.

“I see,” he whispers, and relief floods Loki the same way death floods into Vision.

He’s gone before Loki strikes a final blow. He sees it in his strange, layered gaze – a flash of light along gridlines and a stutter before the soul leaves the body. Is it a soul, Loki wonders, or merely an echo of one? Regardless, there’s no imagining where it might’ve gone.

He stands with a slab of purple skull in his hands, gleaming bright with golden light.

The woman won’t stop screaming.

* * *

_“Boss,”_ FRIDAY says. _“Your heart rate-“_

Tony Stark isn’t listening. He’s staring at ring of holographic screens around him as Iron Man closes over his body, painted black and red and twice as powerful as anything he’s ever built before.

“Call Strange,” he orders over her warnings.

_“Boss-“_

“Don’t make me say it again.”

Tokyo has fallen. Seoul is burning. Los Angeles is fighting tooth-and-nail against the horrors that New York once knew. His horrors – an open hole in the sky, the endless universe, a nuke meant to end it once and for all-

Tony tries to remember to breathe. His arm hurts.

_“Boss-“_

When FRIDAY begins to stutter, Tony’s heart skips a beat. Iron Man’s mask closes over his eyes. The HUD is flashing, scratched and stuttering.

_“You’ve received- exported— force down-download. Downloaded. I. I. I’m- Over-override. Failure. Mis-Mist-Mister S-taaark-“_

Another voice breaks out before he can tell her to reset, to fix herself. He can’t lose her now. She might be all he has left.

 _“Sir,”_ JARVIS says, and all the wind is knocked straight out of Tony’s lungs. His heart never starts beating again.

“Jarvis?” It’s a breath. A whisper.

_“Sir, I believe you’re having a heart attack.”_

* * *

It takes seven duplicates of himself to hold the Scarlet Witch down. She’s still screaming. Loki knows that she’s grieving. He’s heard this wail countless times before. It’s the call of the lost, of the left-behind. Perhaps he’s once made the same cry.

Pity has no place in this moment, so he discards the thought. He stands before the Black Order with a plate of unnatural skull in one hand and a glowing blue box hefted high before him. Two stones. One conjured by his will and another stolen. A promise made and delivered. The Black Order stand as three of their five numbers, ready to receive.

“Take them. Let it be done.” He requests, hoping to any God left to hear him that this might work. “I promised Thanos the stones.”

“In return for this world,” says a woman with black hair and grey skin. Her eyes are beady, insect-like, and her skin is peppered with blackened scales. “Do you still want this world, little Asgardian?”

“Nay.”

“Then what _do_ you want?” This man is taller than her, thin and lean with fingers of an unnatural length. His robes are in tatters as they scrape across the ground. He has the knowledge, Loki thinks. He is the forethought and patience of his group.

“Only my life, so I might watch the worlds burn.”

The third laughs loud. Loki tries his best not to grimace. He knows the type of large, powerful men. They’re too easily offended.

“Your escape, then,” says the smart one. “Because all will eventually burn.”

“Aye.”

From his hands, his offerings are lifted by unseen forces. Only black blood and a touch of cold are left behind in his outstretched palms. His illusions hold; his lie maintains.

“As you will, Loki of Asgard,” decrees the female voice of the Black Order. “Flee. Witness. The worlds will crumble before the might of our Father.”

“But perhaps you will not,” inclines the thin one, quietly. Even the unfamiliar know of Loki’s shrewdness.

He smiles, all charm and wicked teeth. He bows low and his cape snaps up around him.

“Perhaps not.”

In an instant, he’s gone.

The Scarlet Woman’s cries follow him into the darkness, but she does not.

* * *

“Mr. Stark!”

Peter Parker leaps out of the car, practically stumbling out the door. Ned stays in the driver’s seat, knuckle-white and wide eyed. The security barrier for the Avengers compound clangs as it falls to the ground, leaving a dent in the grill of the vehicle.

There are men running at them, but Peter is faster. Smarter, too, and more resourceful. Without a care for identities and secrets, he’s running. Webbing doors shut behind him. Searching desperately for any familiar faces he might find.

The world is on fire. It’s on the news - it’s everywhere. The universe needs saving and there’s only so many people who stand a chance at winning the fight. Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Thor. Maybe Spider-Man, too. The Avengers. He’s ready.

He just needs to get them all back together.

“Mr. Stark,” Peter calls again, but the only response he finds is his own echoing voice.

Then there’s a buzz. A breath.

_“Down to the lab, Mr. Parker. Quickly.”_

“Vision!” Peter knows the voice. “Vision, where are you?”

_“Mr. Stark needs medical attention.”_

Questions are forgotten. Peter acrobats himself down flights of staircases, into the secure facilities deep below Avenger’s Headquarters. The walls and doors are all glass, all except for the ones lined with suits. Mr. Stark has been building. Extensively. Iron Man’s void expression stares down on a merciless scene: Tony Stark, half-suited and pale, twitching on the ground.

“Mr. Stark!”

Peter throws himself at the door. It doesn’t move.

Locked, he knows, but he throws all his weight against it again. Screens display on neighboring glass, broadcasting his denied entry, but he tries again and again.

“Vision!” he calls. “Vision, help!”

_“Systems are currently in emergency mode. Overrides non-functional.”_

“What?”

At the back of the room, there’s a dimensional tear. It gives him sudden, halting pause. Burning with green flames, a nightmare steps through it: Loki, of Asgard. Of the Battle of New York. Of death.

There’s a moment where he forgets to breathe.

By his next breath, he’s blown the door off its hinges.

Red fabric and webs of blue peek out from underneath his sweatshirt as he tears through his own electrified webbing, stumbling over the shards of glass and debris. Loki does not look at him – he’s leaning over Tony, kneeling on the ground with his spear butted into the ground next to Mr. Stark’s head.

His webbing falls short as it hits a force of glowing designs suspended in the air. It’s orange.

“Wha-“

“Stand down, Mr. Parker,” says a new man, who stands on the other side of Stark with his hands held up in front of him. “It’s all right.”

“Who-“

“My name is Stephen Strange.” His cape is red, somehow billowing without wind. Its collar stretches high above his neck. “Your name is Peter Parker. We’re here to help.”

“That’s-“

“It’s not here.” Loki interrupts, pieces of the Iron Man suit falling away under his hands. Mr. Stark is holding his arm tight, unable to fight or struggle. Peter can’t tell what that means. “Sorcerer-“

“What’s not there?”

Loki looks back to Stark like he’s been called. Tony is squeezing his arm.

“Oh, no need for dramatics.” he drawls, “Calm down, Stark, lest I decide you’re not meant for this battle.”

Peter dodges around Stephen Strange and makes to tackle Loki. He hits a force field hard, and Loki turns around to stare at him. He shimmers green beneath his barrier as Peter rolls onto his side.

“Get off him!”

“I’m trying to save him, you imbicile,” Loki speaks in something like a growl, turning back around to make quick work of the Iron Man suit. Peter realizes that Tony’s hand on his arm is guiding him to manual releases, “And in case you haven’t noticed, _time_ is of the essence.”

“Indeed,” Strange steps forward. Peter sits up properly. “But reversing time won’t stop this from happening, Loki, you must-“

“I _realize_ that.”

Tony looks beyond the two grown men standing over him, eyes wide and bloodshot. He’s pale, lined in purple under paper thin skin. He looks to Peter, who stares back in agony.

“Where’s the arc reactor?” he asks, voice shaking with adrenaline.

What Peter doesn’t know – what few people know – is that the arc reactor is long gone. He was among a small group who knew that Tony had had the implant in the first place; he was not among the number who knew it was gone.

Tony’s breath hitches. His voice is gone, but an intoned breath is enough. _That,_ it says. _The arc reactor._

“An arc reactor?” Strange asks.

“In his chest,” Peter says, desperate. He scrambles forward and Loki’s barrier lets him through. “He has one…” Now above his mentor, situated next to the man of New York’s nightmares, he sees the blank expanse of Tony’s chest that is nothing but scars and pain. “He… he has… he had one…”

“It stops magic.” Loki says, turning on the other. “Sorcerer-”

 _“Mr. Stark sustained shrapnel injuries in Afghanistan.”_ Peter thinks that maybe the voice isn’t the Vision. It echoes through the workshop without source, bringing their eyes to the ceiling as they listen. _“His captors devised a device to prevent the shrapnel from entering his heart by way of car battery. Mr. Stark developed the arc reactor technology afterwards, in an attempt to make a magnetic barrier that suspended the-“_

“I understand.”

Then there’s a wash of green magic that isn’t Loki’s. Tony cries out. Peter watches time literally flash before his eyes, back through so many battles and reliving inconceivable agony.

“There,” Loki says, when a bloody mess of metal is left on a heaving chest. Tony’s hand is around Peter’s wrist, grasping tight. He’s coughing up blood and Peter is over him, pulling his head into his lap.

“Mr. Stark-“

Loki presses a blue, shimmering stone into the triangle of arc reactor light torn into his chest. All the blood disappears in a flash of white hot power.

Tony screams.

“Mr. Stark!”

* * *

When they stand on the battered remnants of Midgard, Loki and Thor together again, Loki bends low over the frozen body of Thanos. Its purple skin is iced blue; its fingers are frostbitten and black. Veins of snow frost over its battered armor.

“Perhaps there was good fortune in it, then,” Thor says. His red cape billows, as tattered and torn as the world around them. “Your heritage.”

“Ah, yes. How wonderful to know you find my monstrosity convenient.”

“I meant only-“

He takes off his golden horns, shaking his head as he sets it down on a fallen body of the Black Order.

“The realms have always been mine to end, brother.”

“Ragnarok is gone, Loki.”

“Nay. Only rewritten.”

He takes the Infinity Gauntlet from the purple corpse underneath him. Five of six stones glitter underneath the stars, a portal still ripped across the Midgardian sky. How many Celesitals gaze down upon them now, Loki wonders. Upon the agony of the half-dead Avengers, upon the reunion of Asgard’s remaining blood?

“…You can change it,” Thor suggests, his voice rough with blood. Loki can hear Mjolnir’s song in his hand, remade by Strange’s magic. “All of this. Make it as it was.”

“Perhaps I could.” Loki nods. He watches his skin turn blue as he holds the Gauntlet in his hands. Raised, silver veins of unknown meaning crawl up his arms. “’Tis not my prerogative.”

Long, tired fingers pry loose the dull shine of a blue gem. It falls from the golden knuckles and down into his palm.

With a long sigh, his illusion is dispelled in a breath of green magic.

The Casket of Ancient Winters reforms in his hands, an unassuming blue box that holds all the Winters of Jotunheim within. It turns his skin stark blue but he doesn’t care. T'was this little thing that won this terrible war, after all. He can’t find shame in what it does to him. It enabled him to tell the greatest lie the universe had ever known. It made him a God.

He hands up the Gauntlet to his brother, the golden prince of nowhere, and wishes away the greatest lie he’s ever told. The Casket disappears.

“Go to Stark,” he says, as his skin turns white once more, “He hides the Tesseract in his heart. Let your dear Avengers rebuild their own realm.”

Thor looks to him. For a brief moment, their sins are forgotten, cast out in the desolation that is this universe. Loki breathes deep. Thor sighs and claps him on the shoulder when he stands.

“Do you want to know what I think, brother?” he asks.

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“Aye,” he laughs. It’s the first laugh that’s lived through all this pain. “I think you may yet heft Mjolnir high, one day.”

That might’ve meant more a few years ago. It still means something now – it stops the breath in his throat, hitching at something sentimental in his chest – but it doesn’t _mean_ quite as much. But now Loki can laugh away some of his pain, too.

“Nay,” he shoulders Thor’s hand off him, shaking his head with a smile as he steps away, “I’ve no need of your power, Thor. Nor of Odin’s judgement on my worth.” He gestures widely to the destruction around him. To the bodies and the blood, to the ended wrath of the Mad Titan. All of it constructed by his own words. “I’m inclined to believe that the power of Loki may be greater than even that of the Norns.”

Thor’s laugh is booming this time. It turns the heads of his compatriots, some yards away, who reunited only for many of them to fall.

“Aye. In its wordy way.”

Loki smiles. It’s the first true thing he’s felt in years.

“In all ways.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is some writing practice. Not a style I usually try. Mostly self-indulgent, but I thought I'd share. Let me know what you think!


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